Male supremacy in marble
Public museums and memorials serve our nation’s “foundational commitments to white heterosexual male supremacy,” two Texas A&M University professors say in a recent Southern Communications Journal article.
The authors, Tasha N. Dubriwny and Kristan Poirot, both women’s studies teachers, say the museums and memorials “support, not challenge, mainstream democratic values and figures,” reinforcing “key aspects of American mythology, including a national dedication to equality, liberty, work, sacrifice, ingenuity, and heroism.”
Such values, they say, promote “class hierarchies” and the “systemic violence used to secure them” and embody ‘the ‘great man’ perspective that dominated American historiography for too long.”
Instead of removing the museums and memorials, Dubriwny told Campus Reform, we should “remember more inclusively,” especially women who are “not as frequently subjects of public commemoration.” Among those, she says, “women from the 1960s and 1970s are basically nonexistent.”